Walter Benjamin and communications

One of the first texts by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin – written at the age of 22 – is dedicated to language, and to human modes of communication. His thesis is that human beings have received this gift of language, but to fight and try, endlessly, to communicate the incommunicable. Twenty years later, he wrote his famous text on the work of art at the time of technical reproducibility, and was one of the pioneers of this new medium called radio. His profound intuition is that the more the means of communication develop technically, the more ways of subversion can be invented to overcome the objective of communication, which is always a tool for control and the seizure of power, as tragically demonstrated by the rise of Hitler in 1933. Overcoming communication as domination is giving each human being the possibility of communicating their own life and participating in the reappropriation of their freedom, destroyed and stolen by the capitalist world.

Speaker: Bruno Tackels / Belgium – France